Kristol was born into a Jewish family; his father Irving Kristol served as the managing editor of Commentary magazine and is considered by some as the father of neoconservatism; his mother Gertrude Himmelfarb was a scholar of Victorian literature. He graduated in 1970 from The Collegiate School, a preparatory school for boys located in Manhatten.

In 1973, Kristol received a B.A. from Harvard, graduating magna cum laude in three years. In 1976, he worked as deputy issues director for Patrick Moynihan's New York Democratic primary campaign for a U.S. Senate seat. Kristol received Ph.D. in government, also from Harvard, in 1979. During his first year of graduate school, Kristol shared a room with a fellow government doctoral candidate Alan Keyes, whose unsuccessful 1988 Maryland Senatorial campaign against Paul Sarbanes Kristol would later run in.Kristol is married to Susan Scheinberg.

He served as chairman of the Project for the Republican Future from 1993 to 1994, and as the director of the Bradley Project at the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee in 1993. Kristol first made his mark as leader of the Project for the Republican Future, a conservative think tank, and rose to fame as a conservative opinion maker during the battle over the Clinton health care plan.

Kristol was "perhaps the most outspoken supporter of the Iraq War". On September 18, 2002, he declared that a war in Iraq "could have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East." A day later, he said Saddam Hussein was "past the finish line" in developing nuclear weapons. On February 20, 2003, he said of Saddam: "He's got weapons of mass destruction ... Look, if we free the people of Iraq we will be respected in the Arab world." On March 1, 2003 — 18 days before the invasion of Iraq — Kristol dismissed the possibility of sectarian conflict afterward.

He also said, "Very few wars in American history were prepared better or more thoroughly than this one by this president." He maintained that the war would cost $100 billion to $200 billion, but this was inaccurate, as the cost is now about half a trillion dollars. On March 5, 2003, Kristol said, "We'll be vindicated when we discover the weapons of mass destruction."

In 2003, just as the Iraq War was starting, Kristol appeared on the National Public Radio show Fresh Air and made the following statement: "There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America ... that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq's always been very secular."

Kristol also wrote a book "The War Over Iraq" with Lawrence Kaplan before the Iraq War and stated that: "The United States may need to occupy Iraq for some time.Though U.N., European and Arab forces will, as in Afghanistan, contribute troops, the principal responsibility will doubtless fall to the country that liberates Baghdad. According to one estimate, initially as many as 75,000 troops may be required to police the war's aftermath, at a cost of $16 billion a year.

As other countries' forces arrive, and as Iraq rebuilds its economy and political system, that force could probably be drawn down to several thousand soldiers after a year or two." These analyses have proven hugely inaccurate: The war in Iraq costs approximately $12 billion a month, and American forces there number about 150,000.

He has also been a vocal supporter of the 2006 Israeli attack on Lebanon, stating that the war is "our war too," referring to the United States. He continues to back the Iraq war, and favors imposing sanctions on Iran, and suggested in June of 2006 that, "we might consider countering this act of Iranian aggression with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait?".

This is the man that McCain would most likely have in his cabinet as an advisor. This man scares me to death. He and Bush lied to US about Iraq and he wants to bomb Iran, do we need this type of man in a position of power in this country? I say look up who the other advisers are for McCain and you will see what I mean. On november 4th you can make your voice heard, make sure to go out and vote.

The term, "neoconservative," refers to former Democrat John F. Kennedy supporters who shifted to conservatism and the Republican Party after the Democratic Party shifted to the radical left in 1972. Examples are Jean Kirkpatrick and William Bennett. Irving Kristol is another prime example. Recently, "neoconservative" or "neocon" has been used as a code word for "Jew" by the antisemitic radical left.

Plantains are sort of like bananas, only starchier. They are a staple of the Cuban diet. You are supposed to know this shit if you grew up in Tampa.

http://icuban.com/food/platanos_maduros.html

The Cuadras are Cubans, hence the rank stench of sofrito at suppertime and their daily appearance at the plantain bin at Food Lion. (Plantains have to be just short of rotten to be edible.) Explaining a joke is so tiresome.

PC, look for a goat tethered out back and some live chickens. Some weekend, they will have the garage door open, revealing a couch there and the goat roasting on a spit in the driveway. The chickens may disappear day by day. Look for a feed store out there that sells livestock on the hoof. They may have intelligence on regular customers.

Pizzaman took offense to the same statement that Geoff Harvard made on PC' blog that I did. This is pizzaman's reply :pizzaman said... "You are supposed to know this shit if you grew up in Tampa".

This is off topic, but when I grew up in Tampa all the people of Cuban descent I knew came with the cigar industry in the late 1800s and early 1900s. They were as Southern as the rest of us. I've eaten Cuban sandwiches and yellow rice, and I've dined in all the Spanish restaurants.

But I get it now. It's some kind of stereotype, like all the English are snobish prigs, all the Irish are drunkards, and all the gays have limp wrists. Not funny to me.

Tuesday, October 21, 2008 9:37:00 PM

So I guess I am not the only one that took issue with your ignorant statement.

I'm sorry Geoff ingnorant is a nice way of saying that you don't know any better, but that statement was stupid and that means you did know better.

But what is sad Geoff you choose to say that anyway because you thought it was funny. Oops

To think that you thought that it was so high minded that you had to explain it is just as insulting to anyone who reads PC's blog. Are really just that plain stupid?

You call me a bigot when I have never said anything antisemitic.

Point out where I said anything antisemitic, but before you do, you might want to go read the wikipedia article that I used for the story. Yes it is based on a wiki article which I clearly state at the beginning of the piece.

So why dont you go over there and shout at them about being antisemetic asshole.

Hate to burst your bubble on neoconservatives. That label attaches to the likes of forced to resign, disgraced ex-Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Chenney and his Mrs., Lynn, and Ann Coulter. It also refers to a political ideology long pushed by Republican thought whiz, Roger Ailes, "the brains" behind Fox News, fairly unbalanced news channel which implies the known to invent facts, Bill O'Reilly who got fired from CBS News for creating sources out of whole cloth.

President John F. Kennedy was a moderate, not liberal, Democrat who believed in a strong military. He saw the need for the development of special forces in the US military, notably, pushing for the founding of the US Army's Green Beret force and rightfully so.

What President Kennedy pushed for was a better educated, better trained, better integrated, better cooperating and better collaborating of the armed forces and for negotiations over jingoism like Shrub, the Texas cowboy hat transplanted easterner boob who has screwed up the White House and is presently the hands down winner for being the dumbest occupant of the White House, out classing Gerald R. Ford, whom President Lyndon Baines Johnson once said was the result of playing football once too many times without a helmut. What was that slogan on the carrier? "Mission Accomplished." Hardly. The Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force are still slugging it out because three someones in the party in power in the Executive Branch of our government forgot to plan for the occupation with honest to God occupation troops that are specially trained to rebuild the infrastructure of a subjugated nation. Infrastructure, yep, roads, bridges, railroads, harbors, sewers and sanitation, a working communications and utility grid, reestablishment of commercial airlines and quickly reestablishing that nation's police and military forces so that the criteria for the orderly transfer of power can take place. What is the present status quo? Rumsfeld and Shrub got us in country in Iraq, Rumsfeld got canned, and Shrub wants a new war in Iran. Let's see two wars (1) Iraq and (2) Afghanistan, which is undermanned and provisioned and wants a third, new front in Iran. Shrub needs to finish the first two; he's got problems enough with those. So much for "Mission Accomplished," unless he is referring to the all time high in the National Debt, the record budget deficit which had been erased under President William Clinton, and the current diaster in investment banking which is having a negative impact on the US economy and low US consumer confidence, reminiscent of the Great Depression brought to us by another Conservative Republican, President Herbert Hoover.

Who was it that got us out of those gloomy times and restored confidence, Liberal Democrat President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, nicknamed F(our) D(emocrat) R(ounds) and C n C during WWII. Just so this is quite clear, good Republicans voted for him and it was Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady of the United States and member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, who invited opera star and African American woman Marian Anderson to sing at the Lincoln Memorial on the Mall in Washington, DC and insisted that a Black Army Air Force Officer and Pilot fly her around the training field in Muskogee while that paragon of Republican virtues of the US Senate you leave unnamed, Strom Thurmond, participated in cross burnings in a white hood and gown and marked with 3 "K's".

Free market economy as preached by University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman just circled the drain with those Republican votes in both Houses of Congress to pump billions of dollars into the US economy. Milty's vision was that government should keep its hands off and the economy would repair itself--on paper and in a college lecture hall or graduate school seminar room, but not in the campaign offices of Republican officeholders seeing their once secure elected offices fading before their eyes. Reality: the people, Republicans, Independents, and Democrats hold Shrub, his administration and the Republicans responsible for the US economy's woes.

Where is Billo the Clown O'Reilly when you really need him to deflect? Probably, sexually harassing his editorial assistant.And Anne Coulter that Republican feminist whom even Republican males couldn't stand. Party honchos told her to shut up because someone finally realized that every time she opened her big mouth, Republicans lost votes.

As for the Book of Virtues guru, William Bennett is not the best of pundits on Conservative Republican values because he got caught with a serious gambling addiction and seeming difficulty in finding his way home to Mrs. Bennett. Couldn't seem to practice the very virtues he was preaching to the rest of us. And that is a problem of message of the Neoconservatives, code for elitist cultural, societal, and political snobs. Fact is Mrs. Bennett couldn't sparkle and shine like a one-armed bandit in his favorite cassino.

Geoff the words you are looking for are "flurid" and "antiSemite." Semite refers to a race of people and must, therefore, be capitalized. The position you argue, Elm is anti Jewish, holds no currency. Elm accurately presented William Kristol's background objectively. To toss out a label like anti Jewish is to take up an old McCarthyite "Red scare" tactic call someone a Communist and hope it sticks.

Geoff Harvard said... Stereotypes are very funny, especially if they cast aspersions on a family that raised a prostitute who slit a stranger's throat in cold blood. It doesn't matter that the victim was an unsympathetic creep.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008 5:19:00 PM

Get real! you think that this comment can mask your bigotry? not in this lifetime.

Conservative writer David Horowitz argues that the increasing use of the term neoconservative since the 2003 start of the Iraq War has made it irrelevant:

Neo-conservatism is a term almost exclusively used by the enemies of America's liberation of Iraq. There is no 'neo-conservative' movement in the United States. When there was one, it was made up of former Democrats who embraced the welfare state but supported Ronald Reagan's Cold War policies against the Soviet bloc.

Today 'neo-conservatism' identifies those who believe in an aggressive policy against radical Islam and the global terrorists.

Above is more likely the source of Geoffs argument about th eorgin of Neo-Cons

As for Horowitz and others who state the label in now irrelavant.

What they are really saying Neo-Conservatives in general and William Kristol in particular have been thoroughly discredited since 2003.

What do you expect? That some Ivory tower Wonks who do not know a culture,a people or the reality of a country like Iraq (An artificial nation who's borders were set by a French & British diplomat in 1918 on the back of a cocktail napkin) would know how Iraqi's would have reacted to the invasion of their country?

I think Kristols most culturally ignorant statement was this one,

"There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America ... that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq's always been very secular,,,"

Right Obviously Kristol does not KNOW any real Muslims!

Who do you think has been fueling the insurgency since 2003?

Fucking Iran (Shia)Fucking Saudi Arabia (Sunni and so-called Ally)

So why the HELL didn't we Bomb and Occupy Saudi Arabia the nationality of the 9-11 hijackers?

Neo Cons are IDIOTS! AS Ignorant as FDR's New Dealers!

Save this country from the LEFT and The RIGHT!

Extreme ideologues should be REPUDIATED by the Sensible 80% of the population that rejects both!

But do let those nonsensical Left leaning Liberal Democrats fix the economy first. I want the value of my mutual funds and 401K reestablished and Republicans can't seem to get that job done anytime, anywhere in the US.

In this thread the Bilderberg Group is mentioned. It is actually but one of a very small group of particular advisory bodies that appear from time to time in the news. The following provides some background on those elite groups.

On the uptown swing of things, Enlightenment originates in the "establishment," the ruling class elite that views itself as guardians of the special knowledge needed to lead and govern, and especially in establishment institutions: The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Trilateral Commission (logo is an ominous triangular shape), the Bilderberg Group. Each of these private entities consists of business, political, and academic "leading lights" (variously called Enlightened Ones or Illuminary) in a manner of speaking, do in fact control considerable influence over how geopolitics shapes up, despite protestations to the contrary. For example, the CFR was born as an American offshoot of Cecil Rhodes's British Round Table. CFR's membership has included most of the presidents and secretaries of state of the United States for the last six decades. One of the better known members, Henry Kissinger, still promotes that tie when he comments in news interviews on current events. It was CFR that corporately published Kissinger's groundbreaking classic Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, in which Nixon's former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State postulated the idea of "winnable" thermonuclear war.

When the CIA came into existence in 1947, that "old boy network" was strongly tied into the CFR. The ties still exist. CIA officials still deliver off-the-record briefings to CFR meetings.

The Trilateral Commission, founded by multinational banking god, David Rockefeller, is a sprout of the CFR, but includes Japan. Membership in CFR and the Trilateral Commission overlaps tremendously. President Jimmy Carter was a Trilateral commissioner.

The Bilderberg Group, based in the Netherlands, is more shadowy; however, it's the same idea as the CFR and the Trilateral Commission with many of the same members--but with European accents.

The aim of these elite, enlightened people is to consolidate political control through some form of "one-world government." That is, the end of nation states in order to establish a "new world order." Sounds very Utopian until one considers the "meditation room" in the United Nations which is decorated in eye-in-the-pyramid trappings. Now, Daddy Prez George Bush's repeated public statements, cheerleading, for creating a new world order call this image to mind. Repeating the phrase enough makes it almost ordinary and acceptable. Consider a photo of the senior Bush in a hospital bed, surrounded by smiling little kids while the ailing Bush holds a pyramid in his lap (say "fertility rites"?), said to be the former president's favorite photo. If a legend, the snapshot is certainly an upgrade from thought of this same president whose initiation into that premier secret elitist society (Skull and Bones) of his beloved alma mater required that he lie nude in a coffin--masturbating, is more unusual.